Lectures for a New Year: Neil deGrasse Tyson on Pluto

Neil deGrasse Tyson is ridiculously distinguished: the man holds at least fourteen honorary doctorates, not to mention his real doctorate in astrophysics. He was also declared "Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive" by Time Magazine in 2000. But he's most (in)famous for leading the charge to demote Pluto from its planet status to a "dwarf planet." (We made a shirt about that.) As Wikipedia explains:

As director of the Hayden Planetarium, Tyson bucked traditional thinking to keep Pluto from being referred to as the ninth planet in exhibits at the center. Tyson has explained that he wanted to look at commonalities between objects, grouping the terrestrial planets together, the gas giants together, and Pluto with like objects and to get away from simply counting the planets. He has stated on The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and BBC Horizon that this decision has resulted in large amounts of hate mail, much of it from children. In 2006, the I.A.U. confirmed this assessment by changing Pluto to the "dwarf planet" classification. Daniel Simone wrote of the interview with Tyson describing his frustration. "For a while, we were not very popular here at the Hayden Planetarium."

In this talk, NDT talks to Google employees about his book The Pluto Files. I went through a lot of NDT lectures to find this one -- it stuck out partly because it's actually about Pluto, and partly because the tone is so wonderfully fun, smart, and I daresay geeky. All of his lectures are smart -- but this one is full of stories that make sense of planets, their history, and the work of scientists.

Topics: the history of planets, their discovery, and some of Tyson's own history, presented in conversational fashion with jokes. Also, the Q&A touches on The Matrix.

For: everyone, but especially people who are interested in space or history.

Representative quote:

"[In Roman times,] there were seven objects that would move against the background sky [including the sun]. ... Unambiguous! Everybody could agree that those were the planets." [Then everything got weird when Planet George showed up.]

Also on Mental Floss:

DID YOU KNOW? Marlon Brando hated memorizing lines so much that he posted cue cards everywhere to help him get through scenes.
He even asked for lines to be written on an actress's posterior. (That request was denied.)